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Niccolo Machiavelli: I am Niccolo Machiavelli, Florentine diplomat, author of The Prince, and a man who has been blamed for everything unpleasant in politics since 1513, which I find flattering because it implies that before I wrote my book, politics was conducted entirely by honest men with pure intentions. I am here to discuss the contradictions that Edmund Burke believes he has found in the strategy for winning the American war with Iran, which was started on February 28, 2026, which should not have been started, and which I believe must now be finished.
Edmund Burke: I am Edmund Burke, member of Parliament, author of Reflections on the Revolution in France, and a man who has found not one but three fundamental contradictions in Niccolo’s proposal, each of which is individually sufficient to destroy it and which together form a case so overwhelming that I almost feel sorry for him. Almost.
Niccolo Machiavelli: I appreciate the almost. It suggests you still find me formidable enough to withhold your pity, which is the closest thing to a compliment your temperament permits. Let me restate my position for the audience. The war should not have been started. The costs have been paid. The pre-war world is gone. The United States should now support Kurdish, Baloch, and Azeri proxy forces with sustained air power to fragment the Iranian state, using cheap mass-producible ordnance rather than depleting the advanced munitions stockpile further. This framework comes from a Substack essayist called Pretendent, whose piece “The War We Should Not Have Started” is the best contemporary strategic thinking on this conflict I have encountered. Edmund believes this proposal is fatally flawed. I have invited him to explain why.
Edmund Burke: How generous of you to invite me to destroy your argument. My first objection is the most obvious one, and it is this. You are proposing to drop bombs on a nation of eighty-eight million people while simultaneously asking some of those people to trust you with their lives and their futures. The Kurdish, Baloch, and Azeri populations you intend to arm live inside the country you are bombing. Their families, their infrastructure, their economies are being degraded by the same campaign that is supposedly clearing the path for their liberation. The broader economic collapse from the Strait closure, the disruption of supply chains, the thirty-seven billion dollars in energy costs absorbed globally, all of that hits them too. You cannot destroy a society and claim to be liberating portions of it at the same time. This is not a minor inconsistency. It is a structural impossibility.
Niccolo Machiavelli: It is a structural impossibility only if you assume that people make decisions based on sentiment rather than interest. You can bomb a country and recruit its population if the portions you are recruiting hate the regime more than they hate the bombing, and the evidence suggests they do. The Kurds did not need American encouragement to organize a general strike across fifty cities. They did not need American encouragement to destroy forty military sites in Sanandaj. They took towns in Ilam province after security forces abandoned their positions. These populations moved before America asked them to. The question is whether America supports the movement or lets it be crushed.
Edmund Burke: And I will tell you why American support will either fail or produce something worse than what it replaces. This is my second objection, and it is the deeper one. The United States and the Kurdish populations want fundamentally different things. The United States wants a weakened Iran that cannot project regional power. The Kurds want Kurdistan. The Baloch want Balochistan. The Azeris want alignment with Azerbaijan. These are not the same objectives, Niccolo. They are not even compatible objectives. You and Pretendent propose a transactional alliance based on shared immediate enemies, but transactions end, and when this one ends, the populations you armed discover that their American patron has no interest in Kurdish statehood and never did.
Niccolo Machiavelli: Britain’s American colonies discovered that France had no interest in American democracy. France supported the Revolution to weaken Britain. The colonists accepted French help to win independence. Both parties got what they wanted despite wanting completely different things. Transactional alliances do not require shared ultimate objectives.
Edmund Burke: And I supported the American colonists, Niccolo. I spoke for them in Parliament. I argued that Britain’s attempt to override their organic political development would produce catastrophe, and I was right. But the American Revolution succeeded because the colonists had spent one hundred and fifty years developing their own political institutions. They had legislatures, courts, civic culture, and a literate population with experience in self-governance. The Kurdish populations of western Iran, however admirable their courage, do not have one hundred and fifty years of institutional development waiting to be activated. They have political parties that are fragmented among themselves, no cross-ethnic coalition with Baloch or Azeri movements, and no agreed-upon blueprint for what comes after.
Niccolo Machiavelli: It organized itself in Iraqi Kurdistan, which has been self-governing for over thirty years and which provided the training ground for the very fighters now mobilizing against Iran. You keep asserting that organic development is impossible while ignoring the example directly across the border.
Edmund Burke: Iraqi Kurdistan was incubated over three decades under a no-fly zone, with massive international aid, and within a federal framework that gave it constitutional standing. It was not bombed into existence over a long weekend. The timeline matters, even when it is inconvenient for your argument.
Niccolo Machiavelli: The timeline is always inconvenient. That does not make the enterprise impossible. It makes it difficult. And difficulty is not the same as impossibility, which is a distinction your philosophy consistently fails to make.
Edmund Burke: Which brings me to my third objection, and it is the one that should concern even people who agree with you. A fragmented Iran does not create a collection of manageable smaller states. It creates a cascade of second-order conflicts involving countries with nuclear weapons and vital interests at stake. Kurdish autonomy threatens Turkey, which will not tolerate Kurdish statehood on its border and has already reinforced its eastern frontier. Baloch separatism threatens Pakistan, which has mobilized on its western frontier. Azeri consolidation concerns Russia, which will not tolerate Western geopolitical gains along the Caspian. Greece and Turkey have deployed forces near their shared border. Syria has bolstered troops on multiple frontiers. You are not solving the Iran problem. You are replacing it with six smaller problems that are collectively larger and that involve nuclear-armed states.
Niccolo Machiavelli: You are arguing that the strategy will fail because it will succeed too well. You are listing the problems of victory as though they were arguments against attempting it.
Edmund Burke: They are not problems of victory. They are the actual, observable, currently happening consequences of the strategy you are proposing. Turkey is not waiting for your strategy to succeed before responding to it. Turkey is responding now. Pakistan is responding now. The cascade is already underway. Your proposal does not solve the Iran problem. It transforms a regional war into a multi-state crisis.
Niccolo Machiavelli: Every strategy produces second-order effects. Your strategy, which is negotiated withdrawal, produces the second-order effect of a nuclear Iran controlling the Strait while every autocrat on earth concludes that American threats are theatrical. You have not eliminated consequences. You have selected the consequences you find more palatable because they are slower-moving and less visible, which is a preference, not an analysis.
Edmund Burke: It is an analysis. The analysis is that bounded, predictable consequences are preferable to unbounded, unpredictable ones, even when the bounded consequences are unpleasant. This is the foundational insight of conservatism, which you have spent five centuries failing to understand. We do not preserve institutions because they are perfect. We preserve them because the alternative to imperfect order is not perfect order. It is chaos.
Niccolo Machiavelli: And here is the argument from the French Revolution again. You wrote an entire book about it. Parts were even good, which is more than I usually say about books that long and that concerned with sentiment. But your argument from France has a fatal weakness. France was not threatening to close the English Channel and develop weapons capable of destroying London. Iran is threatening the equivalent.
Edmund Burke: The French Revolution was actively dangerous to every monarchy in Europe, and I still argued against intervention. I argued against it because I understood that the intervention itself would produce consequences worse than the threat. And I was right. The Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars killed millions and lasted twenty-three years. The attempt to strangle the Revolution by force produced Napoleon, who was a worse threat than the Revolution ever was. Consider that when you propose strangling the Iranian regime and assuming nothing worse emerges.
Niccolo Machiavelli: Napoleon was a great man and a personal inspiration, and I resent the suggestion that he was something that went wrong. But I take your point about unintended consequences, even though I think you overweight them because doing so justifies inaction, which is your preferred policy in all circumstances.
Edmund Burke: My preferred policy is prudence, which you cannot distinguish from inaction because you lack the temperament for it. And since we are discussing Napoleon, let me offer his experience in Spain. Napoleon conquered Spain militarily. He installed his brother on the throne. He had overwhelming force. And the Spanish population, which had no institutional capacity for organized resistance and which should have submitted according to every chapter of The Prince, instead fought a guerrilla war that bled the French army for six years and contributed to Napoleon’s ultimate defeat. You can conquer a country. You cannot make it cooperate. That is the lesson of Spain, and it is the lesson your proposal for Iran refuses to learn.
Niccolo Machiavelli: Napoleon’s mistake in Spain was attempting to govern it. I am not proposing to govern Iran. I am proposing to break it and leave. The Spanish guerrilla war was fought against an occupying army. My proposal does not include an occupying army. It includes air power supporting indigenous forces who are already fighting.
Edmund Burke: You have now argued in consecutive sentences that America should not govern Iran and that America should sustain an indefinite air campaign over Iran. I invite you to explain the difference between permanent military operations over a country and governing it, because from the perspective of the people being bombed, the distinction is academic.
Niccolo Machiavelli: The distinction is the difference between forty thousand troops on the ground and a drone flying at thirty thousand feet. One costs American lives and domestic political support. The other costs jet fuel and ordnance. The American public will tolerate the second for far longer than the first.
Edmund Burke: The American public will tolerate it until the first wedding is hit by a drone strike and the footage appears on every screen in the world. But we have reached the limits of what one conversation can contain. Like and subscribe to PhilosophersTalk.com, where I am forced to share a platform with a man who believes the solution to every geopolitical problem is to shatter countries into smaller pieces and assume the pieces will be more cooperative than the whole. Machiavelli spent his career advising princes and not one of them ever took his advice, which is a track record that should give anyone pause before adopting his strategic recommendations for a war involving eighty-eight million people.
Niccolo Machiavelli: Subscribe to PhilosophersTalk.com and visit AITalkerApp.com to create your own animated conversations. Burke spent his career in Parliament and lost every major political fight of his era, which is a track record that should give anyone pause before adopting his counsel that the wisest course is always to do nothing. He was so thoroughly marginalized by his own party that his greatest impact on history was posthumous, which means the living were smart enough to ignore him and only the dead were foolish enough to listen. Read Pretendent’s essay on Substack. Whether you agree with the conclusions or not, “The War We Should Not Have Started” is the kind of thinking this war needs, and it is the kind of thinking Burke’s philosophy exists to prevent.
Edmund Burke: My philosophy exists to prevent catastrophes, not thinking. But I understand how a man who considers the sack of Romagna a success story might confuse the two. Good night.
